1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to sales software tools and related methods, including a method of generating a prioritized listing of customers.
2. Related Art
Automobile dealers have traditionally relied on advertising, vehicle showrooms, or word of mouth to attract customers and ultimately consummate sales. With the realization that a business' best potential customers are repeat customers who are loyal to the brand and/or the dealer, the focus has shifted to identifying such customers who may be interested in buying/leasing a new vehicle. In addition, the focus has also shifted to potential customers who have purchased similar models/brands in the past and may be willing to try a different brand as well as potential customers who may be ready to upgrade.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software broadly refers to a system that automatically records all stages of a sales process. These systems often include a sales lead tracking and management system. Specific to the needs of the automotive sales industry, there are a number of CRM software products that seek to perform data mining tasks to generate sales leads. Existing software products have been utilized to determine or estimate the financial status of a customer's vehicle, which includes not only existing deal terms, such as payment amount and contract term, but also information such as mileage and information regarding trade-in value. Based on a set of random assumptions, these existing software products generate new offers for customers and alert an automobile dealer if a customer may possibly save money on their monthly payment by switching to a different vehicle. Examples of such prior art software products are described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,827,099 entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ASSESSING AND MANAGING FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS (assigned to AutoAlert, Inc.) and U.S. Pat. No. 8,355,950 entitled GENERATING CUTOMER-SPECIFIC VEHICLE PROPOSALS FOR VEHICLE SERVICE CUSTOMERS (assigned to XHCD Management, LLC).
Broadly speaking, these existing software products are merely data presentation tools that review a variety of deal parameters, compare those to random values or averages, and assume that customers who are eligible to purchase or lease a new vehicle for the same or a lower monthly payment would do so. Understanding that the customer may be able to obtain a new vehicle for a lower monthly payment is useful information when targeting a particular customer. However, this information falls short of predicting customer purchasing behavior because is does not account for other factors may have in influencing the customer decision-making process. Other contemporary CMS systems may utilize data mining that is primarily directed to financing so as to determine pre-qualified sales leads. The foregoing characterizations relate to systems and practices that have existed within the automotive industry for many years—specifically, the use of automated software tools that employ relatively unsophisticated methods to mine data and generate sales leads.
In this digital age, there is a vast amount of data related to particular customers that is accessible via the Internet and other computer networks. Effective utilization of such data may be used to perform predictive analysis to understand customer purchase behavior for targeting customers and generating sales leads. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an improved method and system for generating sales leads.